Telling Your Story

“God made man because he loves stories.” Elie Wiesel

Everyone has a story and it needs to be told. Everyone has a unique life-experience; honor it. We are all connected –like the threads of a delicate cashmere sweater – and when one strand is broken, the whole is affected. Your family needs your story. You complete them in ways that you, or they, may take years to understand.

My mother kept a diary. Although the entries were scattered, my siblings and I have been blessed by her recorded journey. Through reading her thoughts, we gleaned awareness of her struggles and appreciated her strength. I gained insight into her character that, as a child, I either never noticed or took for granted. Through sharing her experiences, she shared her self.

Someone proclaimed that computerized robots would replace people. Robots are smart enough all right, but only because living, breathing, loving, intelligent human beings programmed their stories into them. Without that unique human element, computers are just blinking cursors.

Abigail Thomas, teacher of memory-writing seminars, says there is no right or wrong way to write your story. One can start at the beginning and continue up until today. Or start at the end and reflect back. Or pick and choose those special moments and compile your own unique book of short stories. She encourages writers to determine their motive for storytelling.

Having identified with Laura Ingles Wilder and Little House on the Prairie, my motive was to relate to our daughter my wonder years. Writing about life on the farm in West Virginia is more non-fiction than autobiography. Although based on facts, the conversations and outcomes may be more fantasy and embellishment than truth.

Ms. Thomas gives her students writing assignments, such as outline a specific ten-year period of your life in two pages. As one writes down choppy outline sentences – Kerrville camping trips, rainstorms in the pop-up, the found kittens - two things begin to transpire. One is that each fragmented idea floods your mind with record-able memories (Mick Collins was delighted the deluge had given us a story to distinguish one camping trip from another), and the other is the ability to pick and choose the most pertinent recollections.

Give pause for your mind to become a story-teller-thinker. Rather than rack your brain for stories to write, use times of routine chores to give your mind free-range wanderings, to think randomly and to casually associate past and present. Hear the sounds around you. Choose to be silent to reacquaint “yourself with yourself”.

Ideas come haphazardly. Keep a pad and pencil handy to jot down your musings. Just write them down without elaboration. Make notes whether they make sense or not, whether they are connected or not. As you go about your daily routine (or while sleeping), your mind – like finding pieces of a puzzle – will begin to stitch these happenings together.

When you sit down to record your stories, your muse will show up. You will begin to see how you got here from there. You will begin to recount how lives are connected and build on each other. You will see clearly and fuzzily, you will laugh and cry, you will discover contradictions and harmonies. You will appreciate all the lives you have lived (and I’m not talking Shirley McClain).

Your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren will thank you. You are one of God’s creations. And you have a great story to tell.